History

The expression was first used in the late 1970s to describe the
balance between an individual's work and personal life.[1] In the
United States,
this phrase was first used in 1986.

Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a substantial
increase in work which is felt to be due, in part, by information
technology and by an intense, competitive work environment.
Long-term loyalty and a "sense of corporate community" have been
eroded by a performance culture that expects more and more from
their employees yet offers little security in return.

Many experts predicted that technology would eliminate most
household chores and provide people with much more time to enjoy
leisure activities; but many ignore this option, encouraged by
prevailing consumerist culture and a political agenda
that has "elevated the work ethic to unprecedented heights and
thereby reinforced the low value and worth attached to
parenting".

In her recent book, Willing Slaves – How the Overwork
Culture is Ruling our Lives, Madeleine Bunting stated that from
1977 to 1997 Americans working full time have increased their
average working hours from 43.6 hours to 47.1 hours each week.
(This does not include time required to travel to and from their
places of business).

Many Americans are experiencing burnout due to overwork and
increased stress. This condition is seen in nearly all occupations
from blue collar workers to upper management. Over the past decade,
a rise in workplace violence, an increase in levels of absenteeism as well as
rising workers’ compensation claims are all evidence of an
unhealthy work life balance.

Employee assistance professionals say there are many causes for
this situation ranging from personal ambition and the pressure of family
obligations to the accelerating pace of technology.[1]. According to a
recent study for the Center for
Work-Life Policy, 1.7 million people consider their jobs and
their work hours excessive because of globalization.

These difficult and exhausting conditions are having adverse
effects. According to the study, fifty percent of top corporate
executives are leaving their current positions. Although sixty-four
percent of workers feel that their work pressures are
"self-inflicted", they state that it is taking a toll on them. The
study shows that seventy percent of US respondents and eighty-one
percent of global respondents say their jobs are affecting their
health.

Between forty-six and fifty-nine percent of workers feel that
stress is affecting their interpersonal and sexual relationships.
Additionally, men feel that there is a certain stigma associated
with saying "I can't do this".

United
States history

Work
statistics

According to a survey conducted by the National Life Insurance
Company, four out of ten employees state that their jobs are "very"
or "extremely" stressful.[2] Those in high
stress jobs are three times more likely than others to suffer from
stress-related medical conditions and are twice as likely to quit.
The study states that women, in particular, report stress related
to the conflict between work and family.

Stress and work-life
balance

The number of stress-related disability claims by American
employees has doubled according to the Employee Assistance
Professionals Association in Arlington, Virginia. Seventy-five to
ninety percent of physician visits are related to stress and,
according to the American Institute of Stress, the cost to industry
has been estimated at $200 billion-$300 billion a year.[3]

Steven L. Sauter, chief of the Applied Psychology and Ergonomics
Branch of the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati,
Ohio, states that recent studies show that "the workplace has
become the single greatest source of stress".[4] Michael
Feuerstein, professor of clinical psychology at the Uniformed
Services University of the Health Sciences at Bethesda Naval
Hospital states, "We're seeing a greater increase in work-related
neuroskeletal disorders from a combination of stress and ergonomic
stressors".[5]

It is clear that problems caused by stress have become a major
concern to both employers and employees. Symptoms of stress are
manifested both physiologically and psychologically. Persistent
stress can result in cardiovascular disease, sexual health problems, a weaker immune system and
frequent headaches, stiff muscles, or backache. It can also result
in poor coping skills, irritability, jumpiness,
insecurity, exhaustion, and difficulty concentrating. Stress may
also perpetuate or lead to binge eating, smoking, and alcohol consumption.

According to James Campbell Quick, a professor of organizational
behavior at the University of Texas-Arlington, "The average tenure
of presidents at land-grant universities in the past ten years has
dropped from approximately seven to three-and-a-half years".[6]

The feeling that simply working hard is not enough anymore is
acknowledged by many other American workers. “To get ahead, a
seventy-hour work week is the new standard. What little time is
left is often divvied up among relationships, kids, and sleep.” [7] This increase in work hours over the past
two decades means that less time will be spent with family,
friends, and community as well as pursuing activities that one
enjoys and taking the time to grow personally and spiritually.

Texas Quick, an expert witness at trials of companies who were
accused of overworking their employees, states that “when people
get worked beyond their capacity, companies pay the price.” [8] Although some
employers believe that workers should reduce their own stress by
simplifying their lives and making a better effort to care for
their health, most experts feel that the chief responsibility for
reducing stress should be management.

According to Esther M. Orioli, president of Essi Systems, a
stress management consulting firm, “Traditional stress-management
programs placed the responsibility of reducing stress on the
individual rather than on the organization-where it belongs. No
matter how healthy individual employees are when they start out, if
they work in a dysfunctional system, they’ll burn out.” [9]

Women and
family

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Gender
differences regarding work-life balance

According to Sylvia Hewlett, president of the Center for
Work-Life Policy, if a woman takes time off to care for
children or an older parent, employers tend to “see these people as
less than full committed. It’s as though their identity is
transformed.” [10]

Brett Graff, Nightly Business Report
correspondent states that (because a woman may have trouble re-entering the market
or, if she does find a position, it will likely be a lower position
with less pay). “If you thought choosing a baby name was hard, you
have yet to wrestle with the idea of leaving your career to be a
full-time mom or take care of an older parent…Most will want to
reenter, but will do so accepting lesser positions or lower wages.”
[11]

This circumstance only increases the work-life balance stress
experienced by many women employees.

Research conducted by the Kenexa Research Institute (KRI), a
division of Kenexa, evaluated how male and female workers perceive
work-life balance and found that women are more positive than men
in how they perceive their company’s efforts to help them balance
work and life responsibilities. The report is based on the analysis
of data drawn from a representative sample of 10,000 U.S. workers
who were surveyed through WorkTrends, KRI’s annual survey of worker
opinions.

The results indicated a shift in women’s perceptions about
work-life balance. In the past, women often found it more difficult
to maintain balance due to the competing pressures at work and
demands at home. [12]

Work-life
balance concerns of men and women alike

Similar discrimination is experienced by men who take time off
or reduce working hours for taking care of the family.

For many employees today—both male and female—their lives are
becoming more consumed with a host of family and other personal
responsibilities and interests. Therefore, in an effort to retain
employees, it is increasingly important for organizations to
recognize this balance. [13]

Work-life
balance issues and their influence on children

An increasing number of young children are being raised by a childcare provider or
another person other than a parent; older children are more likely
today to come home to an empty house and spend time with video
games, television
and the internet with less
guidance to offset or control the messages coming from these
sources.

No one knows how many kids are home after school without an
adult, but they know the number is in the millions. Also, according
to a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, the “more time that children spent in child care, the
more likely their sixth
grade teachers were to report problem behavior.” [14] The findings are the results of the largest
study of child care and development conducted in the United States;
the analysis tracked 1,364 children from birth.

Responsibility of the
employer

Companies have begun to realize how important the work-life
balance is to the productivity and creativity of their employees.
Research by Kenexa Research Institute in 2007 shows that those
employees who were more favorable toward their organization’s
efforts to support work-life balance also indicated a much lower
intent to leave the organization, greater pride in their
organization, a willingness to recommend it as a place to work and
higher overall job satisfaction.

Employers can offer a range of different programs and
initiatives, such as flexible working arrangements in the form of
part time, casual and telecommuting work. More proactive employers
can provide compulsory leave, strict maximum hours and foster an
environment that encourages employees not to continue working after
hours.

It is generally only highly skilled workers that can enjoy such
benefits as written in their contracts, although many professional
fields would not go so far as to discourage workaholic behaviour.
Unskilled workers will almost always have to rely on bare minimum
legal requirements. The legal requirements are low in many
countries, in particular, the United States. In contrast, the
European Union has gone quite far in assuring a legal work-life
balance framework, for example pertaining to parental leave
and the non-discrimination of part-time workers.

Global
comparisons

According to a new study by Harvard and McGill
University researchers, the United States lags far behind
nearly all wealthy countries when it comes to family-oriented
workplace policies such as maternity leave,
paid sick days and support for breast feeding. Jody
Heyman, founder of the Harvard-based Project on Global Working
Families and director of McGill’s Institute for Health and Social
Policy, states that, “More countries are providing the workplace
protections that millions of Americans can only dream of. The U.S.
has been a proud leader in adopting laws that provide for equal
opportunity in the workplace, but our work/family protections are
among the worst.”[15]

This observation is being shared by many Americans today and is
considered by many experts to be indicative of the current climate.
However, the U.S. Labor Department is examining regulations that
give workers unpaid leave to deal with family or medical
emergencies (a review that supporters of the FMLA worry might be a
prelude to scaling back these protections, as requested by some
business groups). At the same time, Senator Chris Dodd from Connecticut is
proposing new legislation that would enable workers to
take six weeks of paid leave. Congress is also expected to
reconsider the Healthy Families Act which is a bill that would
require employers with at least fifteen employees to provide seven
paid sick days per year. [16]

At the state level, California has paid family leave benefits
for its workers. New
Jersey lawmakers are pushing legislation that would make their
state the second state to add this worker benefit. Under one New
Jersey proposal, workers who take leave would be paid through the
state’s temporary disability insurance fund, “augmented by a 0.1
percent charge on workers’ weekly wages.”[17] Traditionally,
many conservatives have opposed paid family leave, but there is a
sign that this mindset is beginning to change. Reverend Paul
Schenck, a prominent member of the National Pro-Life Action Center
recently stated that he would support paid maternity leave on the
assumption that it might encourage women to follow through with
their pregnancies instead of having abortions. According to
Heyman, “Across the political spectrum, people are realizing these
policies have an enormous impact on working families. If you look
at the most competitive economies in the world, all the others
except the U.S. have these policies in place.” [18]

The United States is not as workplace family-oriented as many
other wealthy countries. According to a study released by Harvard
and McGill University researchers in February 2007, workplace
policies for families in the U.S. are weaker than those of all
high-income countries and even many middle-and low-income
countries.

For example, the study notes that the United States is one of
only five countries out of 173 that does not guarantee some form of
paid maternity leave. (The other countries are Lesotho, Liberia, Swaziland, and Papua New Guinea). [19] Other differences include the fact that
fathers are granted paid paternity leave or
paid parental leave in sixty-five countries; thirty one of these
countries offer at least fourteen weeks of paid leave. The U.S.
does not guarantee this to fathers.

At least 107 countries protect working women’s right to
breast-feed and, in at least seventy-three of them, women are paid.
The U.S. does not have any federal legislation guaranteeing mothers
the right to breast-feed their infants at work. When it comes to
sick days, 145 countries provide sick days to their employees; 127
provide a week or more per year.

There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the
United States. At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum
length of the work week; the U.S. does not have a maximum work week
length and does not place any limits on the amount of overtime that an employee is
required to work each week. (survey) Denmark and Norway have the highest level of maternity
benefits—Norway provides ninety-six weeks of paid maternity leave
while Denmark provides fifty two. [20]

The GermanDeutsche Bank
recognizes that individuals must have a balance between their
professional and private lives. Some of the ways that Deutsche Bank
help employees to accomplish this include part-time working and telecommuting,
sabbaticals, job
sharing, and time out during family circumstances (maximum
twice, for periods of up to six months). (Work-Life Balance) The
company also helps arrange for day care, emergency child care and decisions
related to elderly care. Also, Deutsche Bank offers company kindergartens, special advice programs for
expectant parents, employee assistance programs, and seminars on
the subjects of stress and time management. [21]

American workers average approximately ten paid holidays per
year while British workers average twenty-five holidays and German
employees thirty. Americans work twelve weeks more a year in total
hours than Europeans.

In Europe, the Working Time
Regulation has implemented a maximum of forty-eight hours of work
per week. Many countries have opted for fewer hours. France attempted to introduce a
thirty-five hour workweek, and Finland experimented with a thirty-hour week in
1996.

In Britain, legislation has been passed allowing parents of
children under six to request a more flexible work schedule.
Companies must approve this request as long as it does not damage
the business. A 2003 Survey of graduates in the UK revealed that
graduates value flexibility even more than wages.

In all twenty-five European countries, voters “punish”
politicians who try to shrink vacations. “Even the twenty-two days
Estonians, Lithuanians, Poles and Slovenians count as their own is
much more generous than the leave allotted to U.S. workers.” [22] According to a report by the Families and
Work Institute, the average vacation time that Americans took each
year averaged 14.6 days.

Even when vacation time is offered in some U.S. companies, some
choose not to take advantage of it. A 2003 survey by Management
Recruiter International stated that fifty percent of executives
surveyed didn’t have plans to take a vacation. They decided to stay
at work and use their vacation time to get caught up on their
increased workloads. [23]

Resources

Arizona State University's
Hugh Downs School of Human Communication has a strategic initiative
called the Project for Wellness and Work Life. From its website:
"The Project for Wellness and Work-Life (PWWL) is a consortium of
scholars who are pursuing research on the intersections of private,
domestic life spheres and the public, commodified world of work.
Furthermore, we examine organizational topics related to work-life
well-being including workplace bullying, emotion labor,
burnout, negotiation of gender and family issues and identities at
work. PWWL explores these issues from a variety of perspectives,
including: How work-life balance is interactionally negotiated
between family members at home and with supervisors at work; how
organizational policies enable and constrain work-life wellness
choices; and how larger cultural discourses frame our understanding
and experience of work and life."

In the past, the study of behavior has focused mainly on what
goes wrong in human affairs: aggression, mental disease, failure and
hopelessness. While it is essential to study and contain such
pathologies, it is equally important to understand those aspects of
human experience that make life worth living. The QLRC conducts
research on such issues, and provides a forum for scholars from the
U.S. and abroad who wish to extend their studies in positive
psychology."

The Sloan Work and Family Research Network at Boston College
offers a vast amount of information about work-life balance topics
offering free resources to academics, workplace practitioners and
state legislators as well as other interested in these issues.
Topics covered on the site include Afterschool Care, Elder Care,
Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Family Leave, Flexible Work
Schedules, Gender and Use of Workplace Policies, Health and
Workplace Flexibility, Low Wage Workers, Overwork, Part-Time Work,
Phased Retirement, Shift Work and Work/Family. The Sloan Network
started off as a resource only for academic scholars, students, and
researchers.

The National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health launched in 2004
what it termed the NIOSH WorkLife Initiative. This initiative seeks
to establish effective workplace programs to sustain and improve
worker health. It focuses on identifying and supporting
comprehensive approaches to reduce workplace hazards and promote
worker health and well being. The premise of this initiative is
that comprehensive practices and policies that take into account
the work environment—both physical and organizational—while also
addressing the personal health risks of individuals, are more
effective in preventing disease and promoting health and safety
than each approach taken separately.[24] The NIOSH
WorkLife Initiative is notable as it represents a U.S. government
agency's recognition of the nation's need to develop a culture of
work-life balance among its workers.

Jeff Davidson, the
Work-Life Balance Expert ®, operates out of Raleigh, North
Carolina. He has written numerous books on the topic including The
60 Second Organizer (Adams Media), The 60 Second Self-Starter(Adams
Media), Breathing Space (BookSurge), the Joy of Simple Living
(Rodale), Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Your Time (Alpha
Penguin), and the Ten Minute Guide to Managing Stress. He gives
frequent presentations on the subject of work-life balance.

References

^
Publication in: New Ways to Work and the Working Mother's
Association in the United Kingdom